As good as I personally think Windows Phone 7.5 is, there's no denying it has a bit of an application problem. Sure, there's enough applications when looking at quantity, but when looking at quality and having the applications people want, it's a different story. ZDNet managed to get its hands on Microsoft's plan to attract the developers of top mobile applications to Windows Phone.

It's about market share, not developers. Android is definitely critical mass so the developers will do the work. Maybe grumble, but will still do the work because they have a huge potential customer base.

True. I'm in the process of starting a company whose first couple products will be mobile apps, targeting Android and iOS. No qualms about it, and looking forward to the challenges of the new environments. I won't touch Windows development, and am glad to be rid of that ball & chain.

Microsoft has put themselves in a bad position here. Funny, because they were in smartphones market long before apple and google and yet failed to create a market. Now they are very late to the game and still seem to be in a wait and see mode.

Microsoft was always afraid that the mobile market would take over their desktop market and that they would then lose their dominance. I guess partly because mobile was a more regulated market that is harder for MS to dominate like they did with the Desktop market.

Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us), their lack of driving a platform in the mobile space years ago, is now their doom as a company as the world is moving to mobile regardless of what MS does, and in the process leaving MS behind - having mostly learned the lessons of MS's dominance.

Despite what some may think, people and companies are not typically masochists or fans of BSDM.

Remind me of the saying: "if you aren't willing to cannibalize your own market, someone else will do it for you" MS desparately wants to replicate their huge profits in the PC space and their reaction to netbooks, mobile, etc has been to try to hold back and/or destroy those markets instead of developing them. They killed the netbook market and are now almost irrelevant in the mobile one.